Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 40 —July 4th , 2006)

A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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Identifying Causes of Poor Sales Response in Your Marketing Tests and Projects (Part 2: Uncovering and Correcting Common Marketing-Related Causes of Poor Sales Response)

by Eric Gagnon

Last week, we covered the mindset required to address failure or underperformance in sales response for market tests and other marketing projects; this week, we’ll cover causes of poor sales response due to marketing-related flaws in the marketing program uncovered by your tests, and solutions you can execute to address these problems.

Marketing-related problems are problems in sales response that can be readily corrected by improving presentation of marketing deliverables, content, and better prospect targeting. Next week, we’ll cover market-related problems, which are often more difficult to address by better marketing alone.

Marketing-Related Causes: Problems and Solutions

Marketing deliverables: One of the most easily identifiable marketing-related causes of poor sales response are bad marketing deliverables. These are ad layouts, mailings, Web pages, promotions, or any other deliverable that did not convince enough prospects to take the first step toward buying your company’s product.

You will know you have a deliverables problem when your sales reps tell you that your company’s brochures, flyers, ads, or mailing pieces aren’t giving their prospects the information they need, or presenting your product’s most persuasive benefits, as they are seen by the prospect. Here, marketing is so detached from the content required to turn prospects into buyers that the company’s sales reps are often forced to write and produce their own marketing materials.

You may also spot problems in your deliverables by looking at them with “new eyes,” as you gain experience working with your market and talking with prospects about the most compelling reasons they buy your product.

Problems with marketing deliverables are usually caused by lack of clarity or boldness: You are either not being clear about presenting your product’s most important benefit to the prospect (that is, if you are even using the right sales benefit in the first place), or you are not presenting these benefits boldly enough in your deliverables to get your reader’s attention.

Don’t use presentation or copy that is “creative,” if it obscures your product’s essential benefits and features: Your prospects are smart people, but they’re extremely busy, so you only have a few seconds to attract their attention, to tell them what’s good about your product, why they should use it, why it makes their life on the job better than it is now, and why they should use it instead of your competitor’s product.

If you muddy this up by trying to be “clever”—that is, using an edgy graphic or “funny” headline that draws attention to itself instead of highlighting your product’s benefits to the reader, then your ad or mailing is obscuring your product’s most compelling sales benefits with the ego of your agency’s art director.

Are You Giving Your Prospects the Facts They Need to Make Their Buying Decision?

When the problem is marketing-related, companies often don’t provide their potential prospects with enough information on their product, its benefits, features, applications, and other critical details.

Part of the reason companies don’t provide enough information is they don’t spend enough time looking at their products as their prospects and customers see them. They’re not asking—and answering—the questions their potential prospects are asking about their products. You can solve this problem by giving your potential prospects the information they need:

Frequently-asked questions (FAQ files): FAQ files have been around since the earliest days of the Internet, and they’ve now become common marketing tools. Web visitors are now accustomed to clicking on the FAQ link to get to the information they need, so almost any product or service benefits from having a product FAQ file on its Web site to answer the most common questions prospects ask, and to provide important technical features and details on the product;

Application case studies: Who are your typical customers, and how are they using your company’s product? What other product did they use before using your product, and how is the customer benefiting from using your product for their application, compared to the competitor’s product? Factual stories from the real world presenting measurable gains to prospects are the most persuasive sales content you can put in front of your potential buyers;

White papers: By helping you “show what you know,” white papers cut through the marketing hype of the standard company brochure, and give prospects the straight facts on your product, its applications, and important issues related to your product or industry. White papers range from high-concept views of important technological developments in your field to industry-specific profiles of your product in action. White papers are also an excellent deliverable to provide to prospects who respond to your search engine pay-per-click advertising programs.

Marketing programs fail when marketers don’t give their potential buyers the product information they need on the product, when they need it. In an age where you can put voluminous, detailed product information for free on your company’s Web site, and your prospect is just a mouseclick away from getting better and more comprehensive product information from your competitor’s site, there’s no excuse for not putting enough information out there.

Wrong Targeting: People, Companies, and Markets

Both start-ups and established companies running new product launches and new marketing programs sometimes end up talking to the wrong prospects, the wrong companies, or the wrong markets, for their products.

Market tests will help you determine whether or not you are reaching the right prospect at a company, and sometimes the market test tells you you’re not reaching the people who are qualified, willing, or knowledgeable enough to buy your product.

How will you know this? Your company’s sales reps will often tell you when they make their follow-up calls and contacts with prospects. They’ll tell you if their prospects are constantly referring them to others inside their company, or if the purchasing decision is getting pushed sideways to another part of the company, or up to another individual in the company. You can also find this out by talking to  prospects on your own.

Prospect targeting is one of the easiest marketing problems to fix. Usually, it’s a matter of changing your mailing list selection and prospecting from one job title to another, and modifying your sales copy to address the specific needs of these new prospects by their job responsibility. For example, the needs and motivations of personnel and HR managers are different from those of training managers; a production engineer at a targeted company may look to your product to solve different problems than the same company’s design engineer.

Results from your underperforming test or other marketing activity will most likely point you to the new prospects, companies, and markets that look to be your more promising targets. Better mailing list selection, even hand-compilation from trade association lists and Internet searches, can also help you build more targeted mailing and prospect lists to reach the right prospects in your market.

Next, pick the new marketing activities that look like they could yield the best results: A new direct mail test, keyword search program, or ad campaign in a new trade publication. The solution to targeting problems is to re-work your marketing program, copy, and deliverables, and get your new project going as fast as you can. Once again, your ability to execute quickly and well helps you solve this and other marketing-related problems.

What if your problem of poor sales response goes beyond one that can be fixed by better presentation, execution, or targeting? Next week, we’ll address the strategies you can execute to overcome the tougher, market-related causes of poor sales response in your marketing program . . .

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@realmarkets.net

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Attention Marketing Managers:
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Think you should be spending less and getting more from your current marketing program? Tired of hearing empty “branding” promises from your ad agency that never seem to translate to actual, measurable sales results?

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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.

For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:

http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html

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Test, Train, and Build Your B2B Marketing Skills for Better Sales Success: BMA Announces New Assessment, Training, and Certification for B2B Marketing Managers

For more information on the new BMA Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Building and Certification (MSA/B/C) training and professional development program, visit http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com